Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea.

Volume XXII

CHICAGO

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY

1908

{Reduced to HTML by Christopher M. Weimer, August 2002}

THE Rev. A. Lloyd, lecturer in the Imperial University of Tokyo, President of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and formerly fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, has published several interesting books in which he contrasts Japanese Buddhism with Christianity. He has the religious zeal of a missionary, and his Christian piety is very sympathetic because it is unquestionably genuine. There is no attempt at misrepresenting Buddhism. On the contrary he exhibits a great admiration for the profundity of its doctrines, as well as the earnest spirit of its morality, but he points out in notes superadded to his explanations that Christianity is superior, and suggests that Christians ought to understand the spirit of the Buddha even better than Buddhists. We reproduce here a translation which Mr. Lloyd has made from a collection of a Buddhist book entitled Fukio Taikan, which seems to be a "general review of religious sermons." It contains in poetic form a great number of maxims which are frequently used as texts for sermons in Buddhist temples. We omit the collection of such sayings as are commonly known through other Buddhist scriptures (collected by Mr. Lloyd on pages 67 to 82), and limit ourselves to the second instalment which contains verses of a typical Japanese interpretation of Buddhism. The form of these lines is what we might call blank verse. They are unrhymed and their poetry consists simply in the rhythm. Concerning the translation Mr. Lloyd says: "I have treated my Japanese originals with a very free hand, preserving indeed as far as possible the central thought and touch; but throwing literality to the winds, and in many places combining into one English poem the central thoughts of several Japanese ones.... And yet I believe that I have not often misinterpreted, however much I may have mistranslated."

Footnotes

* The bracketed passage is an editorial addition. Rev. A. Lloyd makes following comment on the Buddhist doctrine concerning "self":

"This poem illustrates the Buddhist doctrine of the soul, as given in the Introduction. The "I" or "Ego," i.e., the soul of man, is born with man, and is at death dissolved. The "I" is nothing but a bundle of faculties, seeing, hearing, intuition, etc., kept together by the presence of "self." At birth these faculties come together, by means of the union of the bodily organs, and form a connecting link between the material body and "Self," which is Buddha (or God). At death, the "I" is dissolved, and only "Self" remains, conditioned by the fruits of deeds done in the body, but yearning to be absorbed in Budha from whom it has emanated.

"Yet, in spite of this doctrine, Buddhists believe that Amida meets the faithful soul and conducts it to the Western Paradise, with its identity preserved through and beyond death. And every Japanese believes that the faithful dead revisit the earth at the Bon Festival, and that the brave dead still rejoice in the wars in which they lost their lives. A belief in the immortality of the soul is innate in the human mind."

The Buddhist doctrine is simple enough and yet it is difficult to grasp because it seems contradictory.

The Buddhist doctrine of the anatman teaches that there is no atman, i.e. no self or ego, in the sense of a separate and immutable entity as taught in the Upanishads. The ego (or self) is a fleeting phenomenon and has no real existence, but the contents of the ego, man's ideas, his reason and his aspirations are the reflection of the law and order that governs the world, and so the reality reflected in the ego is immortal. The substance of the soul consists of rays that come from the eternal Buddha, also called Dharmakaya, the entirety of all laws, or Amitabha, the source of wisdom.

Since Buddhism does not believe in the existence of an atman as a distinct entity, it also rejects the Brahman doctrine of a transmigration of the soul. Yet Buddhists believe in immortality, for the same soul with its identical aspirations reappears in the coming generation. Briefly stated the Buddhist reincarnation is by rebirth not by transmigration. For further details see The Dharma, p. 74 ff.